Out&About

Published on November 30, 2007

I've got a new addiction. After repeated invitations from friends, I recently made the fatal error of joining Facebook.com - the next big thing since Friendster and MySpace.

For those wondering what the big deal this "social network" thing is all about, let me put it this way: if e-mail is the Internet version of sending letters to your remote friends, Facebook is the cyber-equivalent of having them living in the same compound.

Here everyone has their own "home" (their homepage), although readers familiar with gaydar will be disappointed to find that the photo shown is usually just of the face (it is called Facebook after all). You can furnish your profile with all kinds of things, by piling on various "applications" among the thousands that are increasingly available.

For example, to impart some secret parts of you which your friend didn't want to know, you can add your private stripper-wanna-be YouTube videos, a world map to show-off countries where you have scored, sexy photo albums open to bitchy comments, or personality tests such as "which 'Sex and the City' character are you?"

One of Facebook's original traits is the personal wall, visible to your friends. Other than private messaging, a friend has an option to scribble, post videos and music on your wall, and Facebook will automatically inform all your friends on this as well as other updates.

Additional applications allow you do to extra things like give someone a hug, hand out Oreo cookies, or give a massage, vampire bite, bitch-slap or simply an "X" (kiss).

Critics may think of these playful gestures as a waste of time, but I will argue that this is a completely new evolutionary level for human online interactions. As social animals, a lot of our "one-to-one" actions are subconsciously public. A hundred times of 'I love you' on the phone doesn't speak the same way as a fat bouquet of red roses delivered to your office desk, does it?

But public acts cut both ways. Some may inflate your ego while others have the potential to embarrass you, perhaps by giving too much information. (My teenage niece - to whom I have not officially come out - is allowed to see only my "limited" profile.)

Although Facebook can be a place to make new friends - you can indicate if you're interested in men, women or both - it can also be a venue to fight with old ones. A friend of mine almost killed me for having recognised his ex as a friend.

And the greatest horror of all, sometimes you're found by the people who you'd rather NOT find you - like those shags who you never called back. That's the danger of technology which connects people. But don't worry. You're also equipped with the function that no online gadgets can do without: blocking. Welcome to Facebook, another great way to dump and get dumped without meeting face-to-face.

World Aids Day is tomorrow. Almost 30 years and more than 25 million deaths later, we still have not done enough to stop the disease.

AYOR